“In the daily world news, sometimes images come along that you can no longer look away from and that lead to action action. The footage of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 had a huge impact. Not only did I feel the horror of what had happened, I also felt that I had something to do with it. But as a white man something to say about it, being a white man over 50. With the extent of institutional racism made so painfully visible, I struggled with this question. I decided to record this event and literally shut it up in a case. This case constitutes an abstraction of those contents. The moment you as an outsider discover what the contents of the case might be, you are forced to relate to it. And should you still have doubts, in the high gloss of this black suitcase you will automatically encounter your own reflection, there is no escape. “

“The apostle Judas, after betraying Jesus, was erased from the official line-up of 12 apostles. And yet history would have been very different without his act. Judas is hidden here, his booty in hand. The choice had been made. Only we are only human and nothing human is alien to us. Judas thus forms a mirror for us all, all the more reason to show it.”

“Michelangelo’s Pietà, the mourning Mary with her deceased son in her arms, is one of the most perfect images from art history. Not only is it totally balanced, it also exudes the power of the institution where it stands. Mary’s mourning is physical, something under her skin, impossible for us to see or feel. In order to experience, I decided to turn the composition of Michelangelo’s sculpture inside out in order to make the subcutaneous grief outwardly. This formed a rough picture. Mary is present here only in the form of the mantle, allowing the viewer to occupy this space. This makes this Pietà a monument For all mothers with dead sons.”

“No matter how much space you occupy yourself, what is at least clear is that what is under your skin belongs to you, there your absolute personal integrity applies. But to whom does the space just outside your stature belong? By constantly sewing together a silicone cast of my own body in a different way, I take on a different volume each time. Sometimes I just want to take up more space. Or perhaps I am twisting myself into all sorts of shapes in order to remain inconspicuous?”

“We must be careful not to look at our own reflection too much so that, like the mythological Narcissus, we fall in love with ourselves and waste away.”

“Each at its own pace, 172 balloons descend from the cloudy sky. Dangling from each balloon is a part of the human skeleton. All those parts gather at the spectator’s feet, and together can form a human skeleton. When all the balloons have landed, the sun appears behind the clouds. As if with that, a burden from heaven has finally descended into the light, like a new beginning.”

“When you are born, in most cases, you immediately belong to a family, big or small. The close blood tie makes a social group whether you like it or not. But nothing stays the same forever. If at first this group seems unbreakable and indestructible, over time the “skin” becomes thinner. In this work, I have captured my own family members in eternal bronze. A tribute, although I left some gaps here and there.”

“When you are born, in most cases, you immediately belong to a family, big or small. The close blood tie makes a social group whether you like it or not. But nothing stays the same forever. If at first this group seems unbreakable and indestructible, over time the “skin” becomes thinner. In this work, I have captured my own family members in eternal bronze. A tribute, although I left some gaps here and there.”

“Who honors themselves with a monument? Many do not, I think so, while life is an insane miracle. Everyone deserves to erect a monument to themselves during life. Through a CT scan, I had an exact 3D copy made of my upper arm bone. I had this enlarged and cast in bronze and then placed on a pedestal. An eight-foot-tall monument to myself in life, for inspiration to every other human being.”

“In Rome, I was able to look at Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel for a long time. In the center of the ceiling he painted God’s creation of Adam: God reaches out with his hand from a cloud to the naked Adam, the representation of the divine creation of man. Of course, by now we know that things have changed, only now a new question has been added; how will humanity continue to evolve? By developing self-learning computers, have we not created a new creation ‘s power that will soon exceed our own? For the two cases in Let Us Make Man, I took the two poses of the God and Adam from Michelangelo’s fresco. Adam is on the left and God on the right. Only I opened the suitcase for the flying God. The question is whether the new creator will be satisfied with this space. “

“In Milan I bought a plaster part copy of the original of Michelangelo’s five-meter-high marble David: the head of David. I wanted to make an attempt to measure up to heroism. Therefore, I covered David’s head with silicone casts of my own face. What at first appears to be a pockmarked mask is a collage of numerous full-size versions of my face. Because of the difference in scale, it is now clear that Michelangelo himself transformed David into a giant.”

“Sometimes the human body can feel like a structure, architecture you can walk around in. Your own body as a city where the inhabitants live together. This is my own city, bringing together my most important information carriers for my identity: my skeleton together with my skin.”

“How special life can feel with a body and a mind in which everything is possible. It’s a miracle that it came about like this. Life is set in motion through a chain reaction. It must have started from nothing at some point. Aristotle argued that there must have been an ‘unmoved mover’. I was set in motion by my parents, and I honour them in this silver skull – a skull that is an exact copy of my own, obtained using a CT scan. And because humans construct their own bodies independently after conception, I also honour my own creative power, in imitation of the inscription on Dürer’s self-portrait from 1500; as a self-aware creative artist, I write: ‘I, Caspar Berger of Amsterdam, copied my skull thus in immortal silver at the age of forty-seven years.”

“When you are born, in most cases, you immediately belong to a family, big or small. The close blood tie makes a social group whether you like it or not. But nothing stays the same forever. If at first this group seems unbreakable and indestructible, over time the “skin” becomes thinner. In this work, I have captured my own family members in eternal bronze. A tribute, although I left some gaps here and there.”

“It is fascinating to look at millions of years old fossils of animals. In addition, this makes it extra clear how young we humans still are, we still have millions of years to go before we can be viewed. We do worry about the climate now, only viewed from the perspective of the whole earth, none of this poses a problem, it recovers itself. So it is actually about our own chances of survival. Suppose in 200 million years there were a creature that needed a few benches and sawed them out of a piece of stone from a mountain. Let me have fallen and died right there. So my skeleton then sits like fossils in this quarried stone. I poured all my skeleton bones into marble cement and divided them into five containers. These trays were then filled with terrazzo. After this hardened completely, I was able to expose the bones with a grinder. The visitor is now more or less forced to sit on the finality of a species called ‘Homo sapiens.'”

“Because of all the scientific research, we know a lot about our body, how it is created and how our biological machine works. But there are also things we still don’t know and are still viewed as miracles. The question is also, despite unbridled curiosity, whether we should want to know everything. With the total unraveling of creation, should we want to open Pandora’s box. Here I made parts from copies of my own skeleton out of sealing wax. The way to make sure the secret is the seal itself.”

“This bone of my humerus, an exact copy of my own upper arm bone, is made of ebony, one of the noblest types of wood in existence. From the same ebony, and exact fitting box was made around it. Like a sarcophagus, it sits seamlessly around the bone, well protected for the next life.”

“The Torso Belvedere is known in art history as the symbol of classical sculpture. This sculpture has been part of the collection of the Vatican Museums since 1500. The head, arms and lower legs are missing and precisely because of this fragmentation, many people, including Michelangelo, were very impressed by this statue. In Milan I bought an exact plaster copy of this fragment and embraced it with a silicone copy of my skin. This was then cast in bronze and fused with it into one. Thus I myself became part of art history.For you are not only what you eat, only what you see.”

“The Torso Belvedere is known in art history as the symbol of classical sculpture. This sculpture has been part of the collection of the Vatican Museums since 1500. The head, arms and lower legs are missing and precisely because of this fragmentation, many people, including Michelangelo, were very impressed by this statue. In Milan I bought an exact plaster copy of this fragment and embraced it with a silicone copy of my skin. This was then cast in bronze and fused with it into one. Thus I myself became part of art history.For you are not only what you eat, only what you see.”

“We must be careful not to look at our own reflection too much so that, like the mythological Narcissus, we fall in love with ourselves and waste away.”

“We must be careful not to look at our own reflection too much so that, like the mythological Narcissus, we fall in love with ourselves and waste away.”

“How we look into the world is partly determined by the people around us and the geographic place where we grow up. My location is Christian-oriented, and that shapes my view, whether I like it or not. Not that that is a problem, just awareness of it is important. This bronze skin, a cast of my own skin, hangs on the wall, It hangs with its arms spread, its head drooping and its feet lying across each other. An association is easily made. After all, Crucifix means “attached to a cross.”

“Sometimes you want to push something into a jar to stop time for a while, preserved closed off from the outside air. The silver face, as a mirror of my own, I enlarged through the round glass and liquid. It gives weight to this moment in time, captured for a moment and preserved for eternity.”

“Who honors themselves with a monument? Many do not, I think so, while life is an insane miracle. Everyone deserves to erect a monument to themselves during life. Through a CT scan, I had an exact 3D copy made of my upper arm bone. I had this enlarged and cast in bronze and then placed on a pedestal. An eight-foot-tall monument to myself in life, for inspiration to every other human being.”

“The Torso Belvedere is known in art history as the symbol of classical sculpture. This sculpture has been part of the collection of the Vatican Museums since 1500. The head, arms and lower legs are missing and precisely because of this fragmentation, many people, including Michelangelo, were very impressed by this statue. In Milan I bought an exact plaster copy of this fragment and embraced it with a silicone copy of my skin. This was then cast in bronze and fused with it into one. Thus I myself became part of art history.For you are not only what you eat, only what you see.”

“Each at its own pace, 172 balloons descend from the cloudy sky. Dangling from each balloon is a part of the human skeleton. All those parts gather at the spectator’s feet, and together can form a human skeleton. When all the balloons have landed, the sun appears behind the clouds. As if with that, a burden from heaven has finally descended into the light, like a new beginning.”